Sun, 21 Sep 2008

Introduction

Perl 6 is under-documented. That's no surprise, because (apart from the specification) writing a compiler for Perl 6 seems to be much more urgent than writing documentation that targets the user.

Unfortunately that means that it's not easy to learn Perl 6, and that you have to have a profound interest in Perl 6 to actually find the motivation to learn it from the specification, IRC channels or from the test suite.

This project, which I'll preliminary call "Perl 5 to 6" (for lack of a better name) attempts to fill that gap with a series of short articles.

Each lesson has a rather limited scope, and tries to explain the two or three most important points with very short examples. It also tries to explain why things changed from Perl 5 to 6, and why this is important. I also hope that the knowledge you gain from reading these lessons is enough to basically understand the Synopses, which are the canonical source of all Perl 6 wisdom.

To keep the reading easy, each lesson should not exceed 200 lines or 1000 words (but it's a soft limit).

Perhaps the lessons are too short to learn a programming language from them, but I hope that they draw an outline of the language design, which allows you to see its beauty without having to learn the language.